Five visions of self (Storm Grey), Phillip Lopate
When and how does the Self appear? (And how reading bullshit affects you).
Absolute master of essay genre studies, Philippe Lopat (Brooklyn, 1943) selects the fragments (five) which best represent for him “the consciousness of things” and the presence of I in some of the best essays in history. Lopate’s prestige is incontestable since he published (incredibly not translated here) The art of the personal essay.
In Five visions of self the fragments come from Montaigne (of course!), Charles Lamb, Dostoyevsky, Nancy Mairs and Natalia Ginzburgas always extraordinary: “Only at moments, from the depths of our fatigue, does the awareness of things arise within us, so piercing that it brings tears to our eyes; perhaps we look at the earth for the last time”
Lopate’s case is curious. In our country, two excellent novels have been translated in Libros del Asteroid: The carpet merchant And Second marriage. But The art of the personal essay conspicuous by its absence. Things that happen, like the surprising appearance of the Self, for example, in many of us. Lopate writes in the prologue to his selection of texts in Storm Grey: “I know that when I was a child I did not have the robust self that I have now; so, when and how did it appear?
And pay attention to what Lopate points out next in his prologue: the reading he did as a teenager helped shape his character. Be careful what you read in the early years, because if you only swallow filth you run serious risks. to even end up no longer being able, as the very educated Montaigne was, to accept our weaknesses and our contradictions with joy and serenity.
Permanent collection (Random House), María Negroni
An ode to the meaning and nonsense of writing.
The unique character of Maria Negroni. These are extraordinary challenges for conventions. His short prose in permanent link with Great Poetry. I feel close to the sense and nonsense of his writing and to the brilliant idea of bringing together literary quotes with preferences in them for the detourfor the uncertainty, for the apocryphal reports, for his wisdom in composing his own ethics in a personal museum, for having suddenly released a Canon of the Heterodoxy and with these words to which I would easily subscribe: “I’m interested in multifaceted writing, in off-center books that don’t look like anything.they don’t even fit into the canon of heterodoxy…”
I feel close to the qualification of “permanent” that Negroni gives to his Collection. Let’s focus on this adjective. Schopenhauer once said that all the time ago – as one might expect, his words sound as if they were written now – “two literatures which operate completely independently of each other: a true literature and a purely apparent literature.. The first develops until it reaches the sustainable category. The other, cultivated by people who pass themselves off as writers, gallops amidst the noise and cries of those who practice it, and presents thousands of works on the market each year. But after a few years, we wonder: Where are they ? What happened to his quick and loud fame? Thus the latter can be classified as passing literature and the other as permanent literature. »
An aphorism of Jules Renard which, as an icon of the volatility of passing literature, would fit perfectly in Negroni’s museum: “A very famous writer last year”. Finally a book highly recommended even to readers who don’t understand easy booksand even for those who do not know that, as Steiner said, new poems are only old poems momentarily forgotten.
James Joyce (Cabaret Voltaire), Edna O’Brien
A life of literary commitment.
Tell with simplicity the complex adventure of James Joyce’s life. For something like this, potentially, There was no more fitting person in the world than her compatriot the great Edna O’Brien. And it happened, it happened, I don’t know how it happened, maybe there was – literally understood – a conjunction of stars. And in 1999 the biography of Joyce was published, written by O’Brien, the book which reached us this year translated by the great Cruz Rodríguez.
As I write these lines, I cannot forget for a moment the detailed account of the accidents that O’Brien knows and analyzes and which led Joyce to such emotional upheaval that he severed his relationship with Dublin forever. And to think he said that geniuses never have accidents!
It is clear that there was no one more appropriate to talk about Joyce than the best Irish writer of all time, someone who knew him well and who, Proof that she knew what genius was, she shows in her delicious and profound text that she is allergic to academic speeches. which so often generates the cult of Joyce. The portrait that OBrien offers us is both joyful and raw. And the choice he knows how to make is wonderful. the three most important women in the author’s life of the Ulysses: Nora Barnacle, Sylvia Beach and Harriet Shaw Weaver.
Without forgetting its deepening of Joyce’s strong commitment to literary arteither. A commitment which, today, at the rate things are going, may surprise more than one reader.